


tough love and a tape measure

by JennaCupcakes



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Feminist Themes, a story about the proverbial women behind powerful men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:34:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22114927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JennaCupcakes/pseuds/JennaCupcakes
Summary: Everyone had Molly O’Shea all wrong.She’d never say it to anyone’s face, she had too much pride for that. She’d never complain, either, not when she meant it at least – that was cause for bad blood, and she didn’t need any more anger coming her way. She wouldn’t hold anyone’s prejudices against them. But she wasn’t the princess of the camp, forever begging leave from work, afraid to get her hands dirty – she just didn’t do her work when others did theirs.She did hers after dark, when nobody was watching.Without thanks or recognition.At night, Molly O’Shea put Dutch Van Der Linde back together.
Relationships: Molly O'Shea/Dutch van der Linde
Comments: 17
Kudos: 39





	tough love and a tape measure

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Dessa's _Seamstress_. 
> 
> This is a story about the proverbial women behind powerful men.

Everyone had Molly O’Shea all wrong.

She’d never say it to anyone’s face, she had too much pride for that. She’d never complain, either, not when she meant it at least – that was cause for bad blood, and she didn’t need any more anger coming her way. She wouldn’t hold anyone’s prejudices against them. But she wasn’t the princess of the camp, forever begging leave from work, afraid to get her hands dirty – she just didn’t do her work when others did theirs.

She did hers after dark, when nobody was watching.

Without thanks or recognition.

At night, Molly O’Shea put Dutch Van Der Linde back together.

* * *

She met him two years after coming to America.

Funny, the memory of him always appeared taller, as if her recollection and the image he tried to project were blurring in her mind, becoming one. The scene became more unreal every time she remembered it – the dimly lit saloon, smoke filling the air and giving everything its own, hazy glow, her singing voice cutting through the chatter, low and soothing and feminine, everything these men were missing in their lives, and him.

“Good evening, Miss.”

Grand and well-dressed and the promise of the West personified. Everything she’d come here searching.

“Good evening, Sir.”

How could she not love him?

How could she ever love him?

Easy. She had been young, and pretty, and dumb, and hungry.

Afterwards, she could never remember – Arthur must’ve been with him, at least. He never went anywhere without Arthur. Hosea, too, maybe – the old men were inseparable, they loved to drink and reminisce, Hosea more so than Dutch, probably because he knew he wasn’t going to feature in many new stories.

But she remembered him, how he’d looked at her the entire evening while she was up on stage. How she’d tried to ignore it, some instinct of hers still trying to win over the dumb and hungry part of her heart.

How he’d knocked on her dressing room door afterwards.

“A moment of your time?”

He had been hungry, too.

“If you make it worth it.”

Molly had been young, then. It felt like a lifetime ago. She had certainly been a different person. Young, and pretty, and dumb, and hungry.

God, but how it had felt to have the attention of a powerful man on her.

Of course she’d gone with him. She was a mediocre singer in an establishment that wanted scantily clad dancers, a Catholic girl who didn’t believe in much anymore, a woman with ambitions in a world that only rewarded ambition in men. Or at least not in pretty women. Pretty women were only for looking at. To act as a woman while pretty was unbecoming.

It was the cardinal sin.

And he had loved her, she was sure of that, even later when things went bad and she could barely look at him, and he’d long since stopped looking at her. He had very little patience for people he didn’t need, he wasn’t creative enough for that. He’d never learned to lie to someone for their sake, only ever for his. Not like she had.

Even when he screamed at her, she still had the memory of that love. He couldn’t take it away. She cradled it close to her heart, felt like a thief among thieves for the first time. A magpie among crows.

Yes, he’d loved her. Looked at her across the fire when they were camped out near Blackwater, a smile on his face that was almost too soft to be seen by the others. He’d read to her, told her she was far too exquisite for this place, and she’d felt flattered but assured him it wasn’t true. By his side was where she wanted to be.

He’d thanked her, then. Told her how extraordinary she was for understanding his vision.

* * *

Colter was a stark contrast.

Irish winters had been nothing against the cold she’d first witnessed in America. The winter she’d spent in Boston after her arrival had very nearly killed her. She thought she could have been someone in America, with her heart-shaped face, her wine-red lips, her freckles and her red curls that had brought her nothing but trouble back home, but America was big and anonymous and nobody cared for her face anymore, no matter how many times she’d been cursed for it back home. She nearly frozen on the street before she decided she’d been damned so many times for sins she didn’t commit, she might as well commit them. It was warmer, sharing a bed with someone, too.

But Colter was a different animal. The cold was less vicious. It killed through persistence. And Dutch didn’t seem to have the strength to bear it.

“They don’t understand.”

He came to her, every night. She never spoke of it come morning. Young, and pretty, and desperate for a bit of praise. She’d wrap her arms around him, feel the muscle, hardened by experience. Try to relax a few of them with small hands, delicate fingers, until Dutch sighed and turned to her.

“Help me forget?”

God forbid, she’d actually found that sweet once upon a time. She’d taken it for genuine vulnerability.

Young, and pretty, and dumb, and hungry.

But she remembered the nights in Colter. She remembered him shaking, wrecked by guilt, barely held together by the need to keep up appearances. She remembered how he’d cried, his cock buried deep inside of her, and how he’d pretended nothing had happened after the fact. How she’d let him.

Some days, she recounted it all to herself, just to make sure she wasn’t the one going crazy.

* * *

The other women didn’t like her.

Molly wanted to laugh when she realized – people harbored the same stupid beliefs everywhere, as if Molly could be blamed for the way men leered after her, stared at her tits, longed for her body. She’d thought maybe this country far away from the Pope might be more forgiving. But people didn’t need the Pope to tell them it was all Molly’s fault.

Not that Molly would blame the other women. It didn’t pay to do that. She’d get upset when they called her names, but in her heart, she understood. They were young, and pretty, and a little dumb, and very, very hungry.

* * *

He had been so sweet on Horseshoe Overlook. As if to make up for the privations of Colter, where he’d nearly lost it.

Hush money.

Yet she was still vain enough to believe he meant it. She was pretty, after all. And, as it turned out, dumb. And too hungry for her own good. But he’d loved her, for a while. She still held on to that truth, even when it was already slipping from her grasp. Melting like the ice of Colter in the Southern heat of Clemens Point.

Something had changed.

She blamed it on the heat, a change of weather that was hard on him, but Dutch stayed irritable long past what was reasonable. She tried talking to Arthur. He didn’t listen. She hoped he could see the things she did, but he had other worries, a man’s worries, and the nagging fears that ate at Molly were very different from the imminent threats he faced every day. She’d have to bear this one alone.

The other women called her princess. Things weren’t as good as they had been, once upon a time, and the losses were felt most dearly among those who had been the most accustomed to luxury. She was too proud to do anything but sneer at them.

She and Dutch had that in common.

She started to hate them a little, though. When Dutch didn’t love her, but still came to her at night because he’d forgotten what victory tasted like and needed something soft and pliable to remind him. It was lonely work.

She wouldn’t wish it on anyone else.

It must have been around that time she first looked at Dutch and realized that there was nothing behind the big words. When the mask had started to crack for her, like a divine revelation. A touch of the Holy Ghost. And she, a prophet in the desert.

She remembered one day, at Clemens Point, down by Dutch’s tent waiting for a breeze, when Arthur had come to Dutch for advice, and he’d looked at Dutch with such earnest adoration that it had made her want to laugh out loud.

Couldn’t he see there was nothing there? It was all just make-up. Window-dressing. Pretty to look at, nothing substantial.

Like her.

Down in the Southern heat, the rest of the love she had for Dutch Van Der Linde boiled down into pure, unfiltered hatred. And it felt much the same to her, strangely enough. She could only feel intensely towards him. And Dutch was content enough – it didn’t matter if she was someone to take away his worries or someone to blame them on.

A small difference to a man as dysfunctional as him.

And still he came to her, even at Shady Belle. He fucked her from behind, her face pressed into the mattress, because he could no longer bear to look at her. He still shook, and he still cried, and she still held him with delicate hands, ran her fingers through his hair and then sat in the parlor and smoked for long hours while he slept. She heard Arthur snore down the hall, heard the quiet chatter of John and Abigail, and wished to be anyone but herself for a little while.

Something had to give.

Dutch wouldn’t. He was grand, and sturdy, and the promise of the West personified. So it had to be her.

She had left everything she knew behind once. She could do it again.

Saint Denis was like Boston in that it was large and intimidating and full of glittering lights at night. It was nothing like Boston in temperature and smell, in the accents that colored the sounds of the street and the hospitality of the people. Her French was rusty, but it made the old man behind the bar smile.

“ _Pas mal_.”

Men. Always lying to her because they wanted something. She was getting tired of it.

Just like the two men next to her, and the third with a hand on her shoulder.

For a split second she wondered if she should have confessed her sins, because she was sure she would meet her maker then and there, in the dirty saloon that had been her first home in America, the taste of whisky on her lips reminding her of Ireland, a cigarette between her fingers.

They kept her alive.

Funny, he always looked smaller in her mind than she knew he was. Agent Milton was a man who was pursuing a force of nature, and he knew it, or maybe he didn’t. Either way, Molly saw the futility of his pursuit as clearly as she had seen the futility of Dutch’s before she left. Milton clung to rules that gave him power, just as Dutch clung to his words and his guns and his charisma.

All these men, in pursuit of power, looking to her for an easy target. They were breaking their teeth on her.

“We know you’ve been running with Van Der Linde.”

Milton slammed his hands on the table. Spit in the corner of his mouth. His cheeks flushed red. It made him uglier than he was.

“I ain’t nothing but a singer, Agent Milton,” she said, sweet as ever. And he looked at her with impotent rage – she knew he wanted to hit her and had to give him credit when he didn’t.

* * *

She stepped out of the Pinkertons’ safe house and into the pungent air of Saint Denis two days later. She wasn’t young anymore. She wasn’t really pretty after two days of interrogation. She had seen too much to still be as dumb as she was. And she was thirsty.

The Frenchman behind the bar nodded at her when she came back.

“Another?” He asked, his English thick with his French accent.

She smiled, wide and utterly mirthless, eyes closed, feeling so relieved and terribly free that it hurt.

“That’s a good start.”

She welcomed the haze when it found her. She welcomed the darkness even more intently.

She knew this wasn’t her end. God wasn’t that merciful.

* * *

When she sobered up, she wondered what she’d done.

Milton had offered her the perfect opportunity to be rid of Dutch Van Der Linde once and for all, to pay him back in kind for everything he’d done to her. And she? She’d kept her mouth shut like his good, obedient little girl because some young, dumb part of her still longed for his approval. His praise. His hands on her body while he whispered in her ear about how nobody understood him like she did.

She gathered up her skirts and went in search of a church.

The wood of the bench was a familiar pain in her knees.

“Dear Father, who thou art in Heaven,” she said, resenting having to ask a man for help. They always sided with each other, anyway. She needed someone who understood what it was like to stand behind powerful men, what it was like to watch their life and their insanity and to be relegated to the sidelines of the story time and time again.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art though amongst women.”

The words flowed easier, then.

“If it is within your power, kill this man.”

She took a deep breath.

“Kill Dutch Van Der Linde.“

Another deep breath, she had to pace them because she wanted to sob and scream. They always called her too emotional when she did, but what could anyone know about the personal hell she had been consigned to in life already? She had every reason to scream.

“I want him to suffer.”

She looked up from her folded hands to the image of the Virgin in the left wing of the church. She stood with the child on her arm, her expression lost in reverie. The blue robes fell elegantly around her slim figure.

What a high and mighty bitch she was.

Molly wasn’t going to find help here. Men liked her too much, and women didn’t like her, and nobody ever asked how she felt about anything.

She drank again, still a little scared. She knew prayers had power. She also knew she had asked for something unforgiveable.

* * *

Riding back to camp with Uncle, up into cold, unfamiliar, Northern country, she wondered if she should say something to him.

She didn’t scream or beg when he found her – she’d prayed, she’d asked for this, and now she had to accept the tug of her fate-string pulling her back to the man she despised. But she also vowed that this would be the end of it.

Maybe someone would listen to her.

No. She’d read the Iliad, and she already knew no one would listen to the ill-reputed prophet that she was. No one liked to hear a woman state the obvious.

She did the next best thing. She hurt Dutch.

It was a beautiful thing, to hit a mark. She wondered if he felt like this every time. If he loved to watch the face of his opponent fall the moment they realized they’d lost. It was the best goddamn feeling in the world to her.

Power. She finally had it. And she finally understood why men walked over everyone in their lives to get it.

No longer young, not even pretty, but at least not dumb, and no longer hungry.

It warmed her heart. And then Susan Grimshaw shot it out of her chest.

It was only right, she thought. Her heart had been empty in the end, and it would do her no good to take such a black and terrible thing with her when she went to meet her maker. But she had been triumphant. That was a sweeter feeling than love by a long shot.

The last thing she saw, in this light-filled clearing surrounded by trees, was Arthur Morgan’s face. It was pale, gaunt, and it was marred by the same realization she’d had, once upon a time. She smiled.

In time, it would kill him, too.

* * *

_I asked Agamemnon point-blank about Iphigenia. He wept, but not the way people weep from grief: from fear and weakness. He had to do it, he said. “Had to do what?” I asked coldly. I wanted him to say it. He squirmed. He had to sacrifice her, he said. That was not what I wanted to hear: but of course murderers and butchers do not know words like “murder” and “butcher.”_

— Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays by Christa Wolf

**Author's Note:**

> In twelfth grade, in my German literature class, we were given the task to translate the Romantic poem _Der Spinnerin Nachtlied_ into an internal monologue. I failed that assignment because my monologue did not meet the standard for a 'Romantic' work. Some eight years later, I am finally vindicated. 
> 
> I am still on [tumblr](https://veganthranduil.tumblr.com/). Ask me about my German literature class.
> 
> All comments are welcome. Please do leave one if you enjoyed this.


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